More on Woodhenge Infrastructure

This is another letter I sent to an inquirer about Woodhenge. He was asking how we took care of laundry and water heating here.

Right now we have a 40 gallon propane water heater in our home, nothing fancy. We just got a 4' x 12' solar water heater from one of my old professors..it's 20+ years old, but still servicable, I also buried 100' of 3/8" flexible copper pipe in my central column - both systems will be used, in their season, for preheating my domestic hot water. I'm offering a workshop[ this summer on making solar water heaters and the other buildings will get solar heaters this summer. I'm trying to renovate two nat.gas instantaneous water heaters to propane for the common house.

Neither the common house or Phil's place have running water yet, let alone hot water. We're within a weekend of getting water connected to the common house though! All of the greywater lines are in and all of the supply water lines are in. All that remains is to connect the line that is buried between our house and the common house and do the final connections to the sinks. Phil has a food grade water barrel with a hand pump on top for his cold water, he heats water on top of his wood stove.

Methane is on the list of things to explore for water heating as is cogeneration of power and hot water when we get the diesel generator set up.

We dry our clothes on a clothes line in good weather and on racks during the rainy/snowy season. Krista has expressed an interest, but not a strong one, in getting a gas dryer for our home. We're going to have a washer and dryer in the common house for people in our little community. There's also a hand powered washer that my friend Richard uses for his family that in combination with a manual wringer keep their clothes clean....too many interesting things to check on....too little time.

Phil and I took a cheese making class at the Jefferson County Cooperative Extension. It was really neat. We had two instructors; one was from the NY Agriculture Department he talked about the rules and regulations for making cheese for retail sale, he used a local goat cheese operation run by a retired couple who were frustrated by having to live only on social insecurity...they have accumulated 29 purebred dairy goats and gross over $30K a year for their cheeses, mostly at local farmer's markets.

The second teacher is a local doctor that makes cheese as a hobby. He showed us how to make mozzarella in 30 minutes with our store bought milk. He also demonstrated how to make ricotta and explained how hard cheeses were made and aged. We can make and sell as much cheese as we want without any regulations IF we don't exceed what would be 'normal' for a home kitchen. There is a lot of wiggle room there. For now we're just going to try making cheeses we'll eat here. When we get the root cellar in and buy the small cow....you get the point. -Jim-